Moscow Sovremennik Theatre (the Sovremennik or the Theatre, for short) was founded by a group of young actors in 1956. In the post-war history of Russia, in the time when Stalin's personality cult was being exposed, the Theatre became the first theatre that was created by a free creative team of like-minded people and that managed to survive as an integral art collective.
The founders of the Theatre (Oleg Yefremov, Galina Volchek, Igor Kvasha, Liliya Tolmachyova, Yevgeny Yevstigneyev, Oleg Tabakov and others) were recent graduates of Moscow Art Theatre School. The Sovremennik was created in the time when theatre was separated from life with an invisible, but solid wall and when the narrow-minded Russia's theatre system had virtually "mummified" the legacy of the founders of Moscow Art Theatre. It was in order to protest against this kind of "dead thing" and in order to prove, by mastering and evolving Stanislavsky's method that psychological theatre could exist that the young actors created their theatre.
The main artistic goals of the founders of the Sovremennik were the ensemble of actors, the true penetration of the inner world of characters and of human psychology; they sought to bring back the living individual on stage. Spectators recognised themselves in the characters of the Sovremennik. It was for the first time in many years that real people, with their everyday-life problems, bitterness and hopes, came on stage. The principle aspiration of the young theatre was to speak a language of contemporaneity with its contemporaries (sovremennik is Russian for "(one's) contemporary"), and that aspiration was understood and supported by the audience. In a very short time, the Sovremennik became a favourite theatre among young intellectuals.
The repertoire of Sovremennik has always been based on works by contemporary authors. Even though not every play specially written for the Theatre managed to appear on its stage, during the first ten years of its life the Sovremennik tried to be a theatre that would speak with its spectators with the help of plays that reflected the realities and problems of the contemporary world. The Theatre wanted to say as much as possible in the time allotted by the censorship, as if it had a presentiment that that time might pass away.
As early as at the first performance, Alive Forever, based on the play by Viktor Rozov, the audience and critics noted a strong acting potential of the just-graduated students. The names of Yefremov, Volchek, Yevstigneyev, Tolmachyova, Tabakov and Kvasha became widely known. Almost each new performance revealed new capabilities of the young company. Yefremov, the head of the Theatre, stimulated the actors to also do some stage directing work, encouraged independent work and attracted those young directors who were close in spirit to the Theatre.
By the late 1960s, the Sovremennik had already become a developed art institution, having well-defined creative and civil aspirations as well as a very strong, talented company of actors. The Theatre frequently went on tours around the country, and wherever its posters appeared the auditoriums attracted capacity crowds. Among the performances played by the Sovremennik that became theatre legends were Alive Forever, On the Wedding Day and The Reunion based on the plays by Rozov, Five Evenings, Elder Sister and The Appointment based on the plays by Aleksandr Volodin, The Naked King based on the play by Yevgeny Schwartz (a reworking of Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes), Without a Cross based on the novella Wonder-Working by Vladimir Tendryakov, Two for the Seesaw based on the play by William Gibson, Always on Sale based on the play by Vasily Aksyonov, A Common Story based on the novel by Ivan Goncharov, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe based on the play by Edward Albee (adapted from the novella by Carson McCullers), The Lower Depths based on the play by Maxim Gorky and many others.
In 1970s, a crisis came. As early as since the late 1960s, the "thaw" had been yielding to cold winds of a new epoch.
It had become difficult for the Theatre to function. Anyway, it had never been easy for the Sovremennik, not all ideas could be realised even during the "thaw" years, but then there was a single, united collective, which helped the Theatre to defend against rampant outrages of the censorship. In 1970, however, the Theatre was split. Having accepted an invitation to become the head of Moscow Art Theatre, one of the Sovremennik's founders and its head, Yefremov, left. He was followed by a significant number of the leading actors. The Theatre was bleeding, deprived of its repertoire, and in addition it faced a problem of the generation change.
The departure of Yefremov was perceived by many as the end of the Sovremennik. This idea was especially to the taste of the press, which, by publishing many reflections on the completion of the Sovremennik's mission, did a lot to persuade spectators that this was the case.
Such was in general the state of the Theatre in 1972 when the company elected Volchek the head art director of the Theatre.
Against all forecasts, the Theatre did not die. However, it was not easy to restore what had been destroyed.
The company was joined by new actors such as Marina Neyolova, Valentin Gaft, Liya Akhedzhakova and Avangard Leontyev.
The stage director Galina Volchek worked hard on the topic of contemporaneity. She involved Chingiz Aytmatov, one of the greatest masters of contemporary prose, in collaboration with the Theatre. A performance based on the play Ascent of Mount Fuji by Aytmatov and Kaltay Mukhamedzhanov, which was staged by Galina Volchek in 1973, demonstrated that the Theatre was not confused, that it remained faithful to its artistic and civil principles and, in the end, that the Sovremennik was alive and well! Nobody would argue against that nowadays.
The next work by Volchek, that of the performance Echelon based on the play by Mikhail Roshchin, written specially for particular cast, brought the Theatre to a yet higher level.
And the posters of the Theatre, alongside the names of Rozov and Volodin, well-known by that time, featured new names: Mikhail Roshchin, Aleksandr Vampilov, Alla Sokolova, Vasily Shukshin, Aleksandr Galin and others.
By attracting and discovering new names, the Theatre shaped its repertoire step by step, trying to keep pace with time. The Theatre was following closely contemporary literature.
In the 1970s, the Theatre renewed its creative "friendship" with the writer Konstantin Simonov. The Theatre included stage adaptations of his novellas Lopatin's Notes and We Will Never See Each Other Again into its repertoire. The stage director Valery Fokin was especially enthusiastic in adapting works of literature for theatre. He staged the novella Don't Shoot White Swans by Boris Vasilyev and the novella Forever Nineteen by Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov. This line in the repertoire of the Theatre would be continued.
The performance Journey into the Whirlwind (based on the autobiography by Yevgeniya Ginzburg and staged by Galina Volchek in 1989) was an important achievement in the art of staging literary material. The significance of this performance was not limited to a solution to the problem of stage adaptation of prose: this performance demonstrated that the artistic style of the entire collective as well as its civil and human convictions were mature. Journey into the Whirlwind, which was internationally acknowledged during the tour of Sovremennik around the US, Germany and Finland, clearly depicted the artistic state of theatre at the time.
Having started with Journey into the Whirlwind, the creative cooperation of Volchek and Aleksandr Getman (who was the author of the stage adaptation) successfully continued ten years later when the repertoire of the Sovremennik included the performance Three Comrades (based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque), which immediately and deservingly became part of the Theatre's image.
As we have already mentioned, the Sovremennik considered that one of its main tasks was to speak the language of contemporaneity with its spectators. Out of over 100 performances that have been staged in the Theatre since its foundation, almost two thirds were written specially for the Sovremennik and were premiered on the stage of the Theatre. It was from the Theatre that plays by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, Aleksandr Galin, Vladimir Gurkin, Nikolay Kolyada and many others started their triumphal tours around many stages of Russia and other countries.
Remaining faithful to the contemporaneity, the Theatre searched for it even in classics, trying to see real, contemporary problems through its prism.
Volchek turned to plays by Anton Chekhov. As early as in 1976, she staged The Cherry Orchard and then Three Sisters six years later. In 1991, Volchek staged the play Anfisa by Leonid Andreyev; begin almost completely unknown in Russia, this play was, however, largely in tune with poetics of Chekhov. The repertoire of the Theatre included the great comedy The Government Inspector by Nikolay Gogol, and the Theatre staged works by Henrik Ibsen, Luigi Pirandello, William Shakespeare and Alfred de Musset. Kvasha staged two plays by Mikhail Bulgakov, A Cabal of Hypocrites and, specially for the young generation of actors, Days of the Turbins.
In the recent years, the Sovremennik very often turned to the classic repertoire: in 1997, Volchek presented a new version of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, she also staged Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw; Fokin staged the performance The Karamazovs and the Hell based on later works by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; invited from Lithuania, the stage director Rimas Tuminas proposed the performance We Play Schiller!, his own solution to the tragedy Mary Stuart by Friedrich Schiller.
Being well aware of the fact that contemporary theatre is a single space, the Sovremennik has always showed keen interest in drama from outside Russia. As early as the first years of its formation, the Theatre staged the play De Pretore Vincenzo by Eduardo De Filippo (the performance was known under the name Nobody), which is close to the neo-realistic aesthetics, The Fifth Column by Ernest Hemingway as well as plays by "angry young men" John Osborne and Arnold Wesker. However, the greatest success in the 1960s was enjoyed by the performance Two for the Seesaw based on the play by the American William Gibson.
A special page in the history of the Theatre was made by two plays by the American playwright Edward Albee, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1967) and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1984). Both the plays became phenomena in the theatre life and remained in the repertoire of the Theatre for a long time.
The Theatre continued working on works from outside Russia: the repertoire of the Theatre included new names, unknown to the Russian audience, such as the American playwrights Tennessee Williams and Ariel Dorfman, the Israeli author Yosef Bar Yosef and the Italian Renato Mainardi.
For the almost four decades of its history, the Sovremennik has gone on many tours. It has been to Siberia, Central Asia, the Far East, Transcaucasia, the Baltic countries and the Urals. It has been to all the Eastern European countries, and after the fall of the "iron curtain" it has visited Italy, Germany, the US, Switzerland and Finland. The tour to New York's Broad Way, which tool place in 1996 and 1997, occupy a special place among the tours of the Sovremennik. Then, for the first time since the famous 1924 tour of the Moscow Art Theatre, a Russian company was playing in Broad Way. Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov and Journey into the Whirlwind by Ginzburg enjoyed great success among American spectators. This was proved by the fact that the Theatre received the Drama Desk Award, a national US award in the field of dramatic art. This award has been awarded for decades. And it was for the first time in the long history of the award that a theatre from outside the US received it.
Just like any other theatre, the Sovremennik has experienced ups and downs, survived a period of crisis and enjoyed moments of triumph. However, no matter how grave was the situation the Theatre was in, it has always felt support and keen, friendly attention of its audience. It well may be that it was exactly that support and that trust in their theatre shown by spectators that helped the Sovremennik to survive!
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